Amadeus is the most talked about play in many years. In England it won both the Evening Standard Drama Award and the Theatre Critics Award for the best play of the year.aAmadeus is the story of Salieri's war against God for making him mediocre, for implanting in him a desire to serve as a composer and then making his service seem shameful in his own ears. The play is centrally concerned with divine unfairness and man's unforgiving rage at it.aThe play gives us a portrait of Mozart (based on great research) which should destroy the popular image of that composer as a delicate porcelain infant seated at a porcelain keyboard. Shaffer's Mozart is a human being silly, scatological, irrepressible and in many ways infuriating but always-to his last breath-the instrument of an unwearying God.
Peter Shaffer was born in Liverpool in 1926. Among his plays, The Salt Land (1954), Equus (1973) which won Shaffer the 1975 Tony Award for Best Play as well as the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, Amadeus (1979) which won the Evening Standard Drama Award and the Theatre Critics Award for the London production.